(Actually Baudrillard did pitch in with some offensive drivel eventually-something about how the inhabitants of the towers were dead already, wageslaves in a cage of steel and glass). I did wonder if and when “that quarter” would pipe up with its take on 9/11, but no, nothing… not a peep. I’d been veering in this direction for a while (creeping presence of Marxian terms in the lingo: how else do you get a grip on Bling? Well there’s always Bataille for a more positive spin I guess…) but 9/11 was a bit of a turning point: suddenly a lot of the modish theory of the Nineties (cyber, the Baudrillardian/Krokerian end of pomo, post-Deleuzian/Delanda-type stuff, chaos theory transposed onto culture, etc) seemed to have no purchase on events, to be inadequate to the “new” circumstances (new meaning perhaps same-as-they-ever-were, outside certain sociocultural strata of one small corner of the globe?). (“Wetware”-do people still use words like this? For some reason this immediately made me think of brain-matter spilling out of an Iraqui child’s skull). Neocons stampeding their agenda across the globe unchecked a New York City budget crisis, the city the worst affected in the whole country by the recession US economy teetering on the brink of negative growth and deflation Manhattan target #1 for the inevitable revenge attacks (despite having the highest concentration of anti-war feeling outside San Francisco)… this is just the stuff that directly affects me and mine… not taking in what’s going on in the Congo, or the ocean being desertified through overfishing, or… or… You can take drugs to distort perceptions or escape into oblivion, sure, but you'll have to come back to what Mark calls the “dominant reality” a/k/a the reality of domination. Perceptually engineer for myself a much congenial reality. It reminds me of DJ Spooky’s “seize the modes of perception”.
“The Matrix problem arises from our wetware's capacity, through dreams, drugs or trance, to boot up radically different worlds of consciousness” “the human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we take for ordinary space-time.' I daresay maybe five years I would have nodded in keen agreement reading this. This regardless of the fact that the Cabs sonic legacy is massively more impressive and compelling.Īh, those Erik Davis quotes. You could also, in defence of Strummer & Co, say that the Cabs approach through its very refusal to take a position actually does little but exacerbate paranoia and instil a sort of resistance-is-futile, their-tentacles-are-everywhere attitude (whereas the Clash in their sentimental way tried to give people hope). In its own way, “control” -this shadowy network of subterfuge/espionage/surveillance/conspiracy-is just as much a (highly attractive) noir X-Filesy Romanticised mystification as whatever the Clash saw power in terms of (the ruling class, the establishment, the plutocracy). “London Calling,” “Know Your Rights” (awful as it is), "Straight To Hell", "The Call Up", Sandinista, etc, are literally about more or less the same sort of things as Red Mecca, Voice of America, “Silent Command”, “Your Agent Man”, etc.
And that underlying reality the Cabs addressed is essentially the same as The Clash's: NATO versus Eastern Bloc/Islam, the emergent police state, etc. Pakula-type cinema-of-paranoia, whereas Clash is sort of… Che Guavera meets Boy’s Own adventures (soldiers, cowboys, Robin Hood, etc) or summat, right? The Cabs used to talk about themselves as “journalists” rather than musicians, non-judgementally presenting the facts the unveiling of a suppressed, concealed underlying reality was at the core of the industrial project, for all its flirtations with magick and doors-of-perception opening. In the Cabs case, the prism was Ballard/Burrough/ A Clockwork Orange/Alan J.
Yeah, I’d take the Cabs anyday over The Clash, but in truth both groups were aiming for a kind of “realism”, just looking at it through different frames of reference. Funny he should contrast Cabaret Voltaire versus The Clash, as the former have been on my mind this week: reviewing the forthcoming Methodology ‘74/’78: The Attic Tapes 3-CD thing (superb) and working on a chapter about the Sheffield groups. Mark K-punk on the streets and the bankruptcy of “realism".
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